(Don't know why the image turned out to be upside down, must have been holding the phone the wrong way :P)

I saw the movie for the first time about a few days ago. It was definitely great. Private Pyle as a character definitely hit home for me since I was basically just like him in Gym class. Being slow,doing things wrong,being dumb,thinking everyone hated me,not being able to do a pull up/push up, etc. I know a high criticism for the film is that people don't like the part after the film leaves the training facility. But I myself didn't think the second half of the film was bad at all, I actually quite enjoyed it. Also seeing urban warfare in a Vietnam film after seeing movies like Platoon, Casualties of War, Hamburger Hill, and Apocalypse Now which all took place in the jungle, was a nice change of pace and setting and it was eye-opening. I also started appreciating the movie has a whole after watching some film analysis videos. They are truly engaging and interesting. Here is a few I like:

I watched the movie a long time ago when it first came out. It was okay.

I finished basic training shortly before. I can draw some parallels between the movie and the real world one I went through. But, we didn't have any of that psycho stuff. The moment someone started acting flaky, he's out of there (discharged). The guy whose bunk was next to mine started doing the Woody Woodpecker tune. The next day, he was gone, never to return.

I watched it for the first time three days before I left for basic training in 1998. My folks tried to tell me that is what training was like despite the fact that hitting trainees was banned years prior. I enjoyed the movie and I bought it on Blu-Ray a few years ago.

I used to think it was just good but after some recent viewings I consider it to be one of the best war movies.

Pretty much everybody loves the boot camp scenes. It's the half in Vietnam that is less popular, but that's the part that validates the first half. I don't see the movie as anti-military so much as it is saying that the boot camp was a necessary evil to get soldiers ready to survive. The war machine here is the boot camp, efficiently weeding out not just weakness but also outliers. Kubrick never falls into the cliche that the military doesn't want soldiers to think (his script outright says the opposite); he's saying that the military wants them to think a certain way. The best shot of the movie comes after the boot camp scenes. It's when the squad leader dies, the next man steps up, and the squad moves in perfect unison from cover to cover. It's when the madness of the first half starts to make its own sense even if it never becomes palatable.

There are lots of very emotional movies of war's injustices (Kubrick even made a great one earlier in his career), but leave it to Kubrick to make a horrifying dissection of it.

It's a bit unsettling. All of Kubrick's films are. But that's what makes it great. Great film.

I found ending of the film to be the most unsettling. Singing a child-like song while walking through a post-apocalyptic city the soldiers had a part in causing without expressing any emotion of their actions is pretty terrifying.